Welcome to Tomorrow’s Teaching!

What this newsletter is about

Tomorrow’s Teaching and the Digital Humanities

Hello and welcome to Tomorrow's Teaching! My name is Andy (Dr Andreas Matthias in full), and I'm a university lecturer in philosophy. I have been teaching philosophy for 20 years now, and I worked as a computer programmer and web and e-learning systems administrator for another 20 years before that. While I was a student, and later as a software developer, I was also working for over ten years as a freelance teacher of programming languages at a centre for lifelong learning (“Volkshochschule”) in Germany.

This is all to let you know that I have always had a passion for both computer programming (my first computer was a ZX81 in 1981, but I was programming from books, without a computer, for years before that) and teaching (my first teaching venture were private computer programming classes held in my bedroom in 1985 or 86, announced by flyers stuck at the neighbourhood’s lampposts). And, as you can see, I’m still doing it.

I’m not much of a philosopher (although I did have my 5 minutes :)), but I’ve always enjoyed teaching it. A few years ago, I started the Daily Philosophy web magazine and newsletter, the Accented Philosophy podcast, and I wrote a number of books and scholarly articles.

Today, I continue to publish Daily Philosophy and its YouTube channel, but I also have a number of other blogs and channels on topics that interest me: On the Andreas Matthias channel I publish philosophy lectures for my students and the interested public. On EveryDawn, I publish book reviews and inspirational philosophy. And from next term on, I’ll be teaching Computer Programming for the Humanities and other Digital Humanities related topics at my university.

The problem with universities

Over the years, I’ve known many humanities instructors and professors, particularly in philosophy. And I have found that they are often reluctant to embrace new technologies. This surely has to do with the fact that they chose to do philosophy for a living, rather than something more technological. But the result is that philosophy teaching is still often done in the way Abelard would have taught -- back in the 12th century.

It is not only about technology, I hasten to add. The distaste of many of my colleagues for computers and AI is one thing -- but modern teaching methods in general are very much underused in university humanities teaching. Many professors I have known seem to be happy to stand at one end of a room and talk for an hour, leaving the interaction with the students to their teaching assistants. Or they ask the class a few questions, but never give the students enough time to answer them, to think for themselves, and to learn how to solve a problem before being told the answer.

Non-verbal methods of information transfer and insight-building are also very much under-utilised. When was the last time you saw a humanities professor use a mindmap, an interactive infographic, hands-on exercises, games, immersive virtual worlds, or student activities like 3D modelling or video creation in the teaching of academic subjects? Why do we assume that linear text is the best way to raise a new generation of scientists and academics? Of course, there is a lot of admin talk about new media in teaching, but little of that is actually used in everyday teaching. Flashy projects get lavishly funded, only to disappear after a model deployment and a bit of PR attention.

The recent explosion in generative AI has only made things worse: students are now experts in using GPT models to write their homework and cheat in assessments, while teaching staff have no idea how to prevent them from doing so and seem utterly lost, preferring to just look away rather than fight a pointless battle against their own students. But the problem is not going away, and we’ll have to learn to live and teach with AI rather than against it.

All this is not necessarily the fault of the instructors themselves. We exist in education systems that require us to teach as effectively as possible, to cram more and more content into less and less time, to streamline students’ “lifecycles” so that they go through the grinder in an organised, frictionless way, coming out on the other end standardized, homogenised, ready to be hired, a packaged, labelled product of the education system rather than an individual, unique, creative human being.

Early career academics, and the same seems to be true of schoolteachers in a slightly different way, live under the constant pressure to fulfil administrative demands: to publish, to write grant applications, to engage in public outreach, to tick a hundred different boxes that are required in order to build a career in the academic system. Few have the time and inclination to add “learning modern teaching methods” to their list of duties. And universities, administered by committees that look only at numerical performance indicators, are happy to encourage this mechanical approach to teaching. The goal of teaching is not learning, but the achievement of “course outcomes,” the completion of “graduate attributes,” the alignment of course content with formal faculty and university requirements that can be ticked off one by one.

Added to this mix are the issues today’s students bring into the university with them. The pressure to study, to get good grades, because the inflation in academic degrees means that today almost everyone who wants to live an average life has to obtain a university degree of some sort, whether they are interested in the academic life of not. Universities are increasingly seen as vocational training institutions, by their own administrations as well as by their funding bodies and the various political institutions.

At the same time, the distractions of technology and the loss of safe environments make it hard for the students to concentrate in class and to read books and papers outside of it. The polarisation of society and the loss of a culture of civilised dialogue makes it increasingly harder every year to address the interesting questions in class discussions. Instructors never know whether they will be the next to be fired because they discussed a nude renaissance sculpture in class, a caricature in a magazine, or the theory and science of gender, race, climate change, natural evolution, religion or a hundred other controversial topics, rubbing someone the wrong way.

Why yet another newsletter?

This all brings us back to Tomorrow’s Teaching. Here in this newsletter, I would like to argue for a positive, creative use of both modern technologies and better methods of teaching in the humanities, and hopefully provide you with helpful information and resources so that you can use these methods and technologies in your own teaching practice.

We will have tutorials, introductions, but also more critical articles and theoretical pieces that may question some of today’s teaching practices. Is the Humboldt ideal still alive, for instance? Should it be revived? Might we have better teaching without all these new inventions? Can we turn the clock back and return to a world of books and traditional scholarship? I am as prone to nostalgia as the next man, and some of these questions are intriguing. I hope that we will get experts to interview who will discuss such issues with us.

Although I am a philosopher and my knowledge mainly extends to the teaching of the humanities in a university setting, I did also teach programming languages for many years, both at universities and lifelong-learning institutions, and even the use of AI in the creative industries. So the focus here will be on universities and humanities, but much of what we will see also applies to other kinds of education. Primary and secondary school teaching, even kindergartens could potentially profit from the use of AI tools to improve their range of activities and to deliver more engaging and inclusive teaching.

In the past years, I myself experienced getting a new, free teaching assistant in the form of generative AI. I’ve used GPT-models to brainstorm classes, to create exercises, to show students how to check their own arguments, and to create project assignments that require the students to complete real-life, valuable work in the creative industries as part of their studies. All this would not have been possible just a few years ago.

AI has the potential to engage students in totally new ways, and it could well make our classes more interesting, effective and beneficial to the students without sacrificing anything in terms of quality -- if we all learn together how it employ it in a good way, rather than just rejecting it as a tool for student cheating.

Let’s do this together

I would like this newsletter and website to be a two-way discussion between us. It is most useful if it answers your questions and helps you deal with your problems utilising new technologies and new ways of teaching. And therefore I would like to encourage you to comment on every post and to tell me what you think, what your needs and problems are, and which topics you would be interested in discussing. In this way, I can create posts and videos that help you solve your problems when you apply AI or other new methods to the teaching of the humanities.

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Thanks for reading all this and see you inside!

— Andy